CS Student is top digital social innovator

Tomas Diez, a first year Intel PhD student in the UCL Computer Science Department, was featured in the Guardian newspaper in a list of "10 innovative people that are driving some of the most exciting digital social innovations".

The list was compiled by the innovation charity Nesta which is leading the Europe-wide Digital Social Innovation (DSI) research project funded by the European Commission. The project aims to explore the potential in DSI and support more of it to happen.

Tomas Diez is the co-founder of the Smart Citizen Kit project which, in September 2013 won the World Smart Cities Innovative Initiative. The project aims to give ordinary citizens the tools needed to measure the quality of their environment - pollution, humidity, noise etc. - and to share the results with others in this city in real time. It is developing a set of low-cost sensors which stream measurements via WiFi to, for example a smart-phone app. "Smart Citizen Kits" are now deployed in many locations in Europe, North America and across the world.